I built the EasyLatLon tool a while ago as a simple way for you to grab the lat/lon of any location. It’s worked quite well for that, and it’s been rather popular, but now I’ve added some additional features to make it much more useful.

Starting now, you can add a few location to our site with just a few clicks. Watch the video below to see how it works, and then head over to the EasyLatLon page to try it for yourself!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSAD0rHsqOQ

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The system we have been using for file comment was hand-built years ago, and really it was rather crude. To simplify things, we’ve just implemented the Comment system using the Facebook JavaScript SDK. This system looks nicer, and should be much easier to use. When viewing any file on the site, just scroll down and you’ll see the comment box.

Here are a few examples of it on the site.

Some test comments, so you can see how they look:

When you post, you have the option to have the comment appear on your profile. While we certainly encourage this, you can turn it off if you’ll be leaving a lot of comments on files so that you don’t clutter up your Facebook stream:

If comments had been left for a file using the previous system, we’ve included a link to those so you can still view them:

Lastly, we know that some of you don’t use Facebook and have no desire to, and that’s perfectly fine. If you’re not logged in to Facebook, you can still leave a comment without any problems.

So there you have it. If you have any thoughts, questions or problems, please let us know.

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This is a pretty simple one. I often find myself quickly needing to get the latitude/longitude for a particular point, and there’s not a simple way to get it. There’s some easy ways, but none that are just simple and quick. That’s what this fills.

Fire up Easy LatLon and browse around using the Google Earth Plug-in. You can use the search box to find a location at the top by name or by address. Every time the camera stops moving, the lat/lon on the left side of the page are updated.

Suppose you wanted to know the location of Yankee Stadium. Go to Easy LatLon, type in “Yankee Stadium” at the top, and the results are there on the side. Copy/paste them to whatever you need.

Like I said, it’s very simple. I hope it’s helpful for you from time to time.

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We’ve just reached a cool milestone. One our most prolific file submitters, SpiderX22, has now had his files downloaded over a million times! He’s submitted more than 1200 files to the site over the years, and the total downloads for those files has just passed 1,000,000. Great work, Spider!

I also want to recognize two other big submitters — McMaster_de andsladys. They’ve both submitted more files than Spider has, though neither has reach a million downloads yet. McMaster is well over 900,000 and will probably reach a million pretty soon.

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Those those of you that use our forums and use Twitter, here’s a new account for you to follow — @GEHforums. This Twitter account simply takes any new threads in the forums and tweets out the title of the thread and a link. It’s a good way to keep up with new discussions without having to wade through the forums each day. If you participate in a thread, then you can just “subscribe” to the thread when you’re posting to automatically receive e-mail updates of new posts.

Also, don’t forget about the main @gearthhacks Twitter account. It currently posts items from the blog, but soon we’ll be pushing new file uploads to it as well.

Thanks!

Mickey

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Google has brought out a handful of new 3D cities in the past few days. Today saw the release of Seattle and Pittsburgh, both of which now have hundreds of full-color buildings and look excellent. Here is a shot from Pittsburgh.

A few days ago, Google unveiled a new layer for Google Earth that has over 5700 hundred buildings from ancient Rome rebuilt in 3D. It’s a slow-loading collection, but it is amazing. Here is a short video introducing the new layer:

Google Earth is now available as a free app for the iPhone. Not only is it free, but it’s good! It looks very similar to the normal Google Earth program, includes 3D terrain, Wikipedia/Panoramio icons and a few other goodies. No 3D buildings, but that’s not a problem for now. The interface is phenomenal, with superb gesture controls and even a bit of accelerometer support. My wish for version 2 is that they offer some kind of KML support so we can push our own files out to it.

Version 2.2 of the iPhone firmware should be out in a few weeks and promises to have StreetView support, so that will be kind of a mesh of these two items. Hopefully the interface on that is as good as it is in the new Google Earth application.